John Wellwood

“ What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark: his hand clutching the tiller—never speaking a word, and displeased if any other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land ”

“ Of the influences that went to form his moral constitution not the least marked was that of Highland scenery. Even amidst the gaieties of Weimar, he would shut his eyes, and, whistling a Highland tune, see the old hills. The autumn after he was licensed—1837—the last before his life-work began—was spent in Morven and Skye. He speaks of ‘passionate hours in the lonely mountains,’ and, to judge from his journal, his excitement in these scenes was wonderful, varying from ecstatic [27] delight to solemn awe and worship. ”

“ One summer day in the closing year of last century, General Macleod, chief of the clan, visited the manse of Fiunary, and took away with him to Dunvegan his young namesake, the minister’s eldest son, Norman the Second. Nothing could have been more delightful to the boy, who cared little for study, preferring any day the seas and the hills, and was already at sixteen a Highland patriot, with his head full of the legends of that old castle in the shadow of which his ancestors were born. ”

“ But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ. ”

“ Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces ”

“ Good Words, while leading men ‘to know and to love God,’ was to represent various schools of Christian thought, and make a point of human interest and scientific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The magazine was the mirror of the editor’s mind, full of spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler souls. ”

“ Norman the First presents a rare figure in an age in which the clergy were noted for anything but ecclesiastical zeal. He had all the culture that was going, but did not prefer Horace to David, nor Virgil to Isaiah, and could hate fanaticism without reducing religion to a cauld clash of morality. He was the ideal of a Highland minister, daring the stormy strait and the misty mountain, swaying the wild Celtic heart by tender or fiery appeals, and drawing the poor and the troubled to his door from the remotest glens. ”

“ Jock Hall, the outcast in The Starling, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries, A man’s a man for a’ that, drives the lesson home, ‘And ye are a man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement. ”

“ The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. ”

“ Macleod’s sympathy was for the individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’s [77] experience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, opened up the beauty of the Christian life. ”

“ In a few minutes they will be down upon the Row. ‘Look out, Ruari!’ whispers the minister. ‘Stand by the sheets!’ cries Rory to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ‘Ready!’ is their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking; falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it ”

“ But every man to his vocation, and that of Norman Macleod was the therapeutics of religion. For that he was unconsciously preparing himself by his absorption in the panorama of existence. He knew he was to be a minister, but he could never have been the man his country admired, had his boyish thoughts been focused on his destination, and not taken up with comrades, and the appearances of life. ”

“ If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for the height of human perfection and setting up as its reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. ”

“ The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaborate [93] decline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions of Good Words he could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. ”

“ A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. ”

“ The age, he says, is against, and rightly against, monopolies of every kind. To defend a State Church on the ground of treaties is idle; the question is whether it satisfies the nation. Nor does he argue for the preservation of the Establishment on any such ground as the need of a placard on the nation’s door, Religion recognised within. Voluntaryism is not only insufficient to meet the spiritual wants of the country, but involves the dependence of the clergy. On the other hand, the Church exists for the people, and has no interests apart from theirs. ”

“ As he observed the German laxity he called for a new Luther, though he condemned the contrary vice of the Church at home, that would measure his piety by his reading a newspaper on Sunday. He made excursions, one as far as the Tyrol, in the course of which he visited the picture galleries of Vienna, Munich, and Dresden. But the great event of his life in Weimar was his falling in love with the Court beauty,—’La Baronne,’ he calls her,—which he did in a fashion of poetic worship, worthy of a hero of romance or song. ”

“ Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart; which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, wanted a world of men. ”

“ Macleod her husband’s bust in marble. There was a general feeling that he might never return. ‘Come life or death,’ he said of his undertaking, ‘I believe it is God’s will.’ For several weeks he had worked so hard, and gone through so much excitement, that when he started he was utterly worn out; and throughout the tour, from first to last, he was afflicted with a swelling of the limbs.
Fortunate he was in having for his fellow-deputy Dr. Watson, the minister of Dundee, who thought with him on religious matters (though pawky to the point of genius) and was kin to him in spirit. ”

“ There was doubtless at first a powerful tide of Christian sentiment; light there was little or none. ‘When our Saviour’s eyes,’ said the president, ‘witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not been presented to the eyes of God or man.... And is there not another class of eyes which may be said to be upon you? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you? Are not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know not yet of your meeting: but upon the result of your [60] meeting much of their interests may be suspended. ”

“ Now it is conceivable that one might be eager for reform, and yet disapprove of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stop intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it would have led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees on trivial and absurd pretexts, rejection for rejection’s sake. Popular election entails complete responsibility, but when men have to take their ministers from a patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another without saying why, they will be apt to use their licence to make up for their slavery. ”

“ After the French Revolution the awakening of man’s spirit, extending from letters and politics to religion, led in Scotland to the rise of the Evangelical party. They had lofty notions of ecclesiastical authority, and manifested their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose holiness was qualified by originality, such as Macleod Campbell, whom they incontinently deposed. But, for all that, they were the best of the clergy, because they were in vital earnest with the highest things. ”

“ The society of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations or congregations like an army acting through its different regiments, is the grand social system which Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’
Having made himself personally acquainted with his congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, educational, and social needs of the parish should be met. ”

“ At the first sight of India, a land so full of romantic and mysterious interest, Macleod as a Briton, and still more as a Christian, was strangely moved. The working plan of the deputies may be stated in a dozen words: Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, with a loop of travel at each. In one city as in another Macleod had much the same round of triumphs and of toils. He conferred with missionaries of different Churches; inspected colleges [130] and schools; and, accompanied by the highest aristocracy, both native and English, delivered sermons and addresses to enormous crowds. ”

“ Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.
The Old Lieutenant, begun in Good Words before he knew it was to be a story, and continued without sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, and loaded with extraneous matter; but the elder Fleming is like one of Thackeray’s men, and, of the domestics of the good old days when the social bond was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby? ”